The estate life

How to chuck a software job and get your hands dirty

November 12, 2017 12:05 am | Updated 12:05 am IST

‘Ph.D.’ here is short for ‘post hole diggers’. A small round hole is dug with a tool straight down into the earth, to place a fence pole or a signpost. The term is borrowed from a song by country artist Aaron Tippon where he sings about having pride for working hard for a living.

Since our supervisor was away that day, I had to double up as owner and supervisor at the estate today. While hanging out in the estate for a few hours was the norm, this was the first time I had to toil for the whole day. In the estates, things are no different from other businesses. If you are a supervisor, you don’t have to work too hard: you just guide the workers on what to do. If you have more people to work, you become a writer or manager. Then you just supervise the supervisors, and you make more moolah. Supervisors typically take a cut from the workers in estates, but ours don’t.

Our team at this estate of just under a hectare is just three workers and me, the owner. The workers are in their twenties and the supervisor may be 30. I was desperately searching for some workers around the estate when I met this chap who used to run a country-chicken store in town. He was derailed by demonetisation and a poorly judged loan to a relative with his vehicle as the guarantee. He lost the vehicle, had to close his shop and was looking for any kind of work and needed some money urgently to get his son discharged from hospital. He was also a driver and the fact that my driver’s licence would expire soon and it would require a 250-km trip to Bengaluru to renew it made him the right guy. Also he was willing to listen to my natural farming gyan. Others would say, without English fertilizers nothing would work here!

The owner usually has all protective gear. Local workers made fun of me, though I have been trying to tell them safety comes first. But our supervisor cut his leg working almost barefoot. This is a very risky job. Wild animals on the estate or on your way could be fatal, and climbing trees without protective gear is even more risky. A foot in the wrong place or on a weak tree branch could be difficult. But while trying to eke out a living, they have no time to think about safety. Luckily we have a clinic with a doctor in an old-age home nearby. The young doctor and the experienced nurse (both Malayalis) made us Malayalis feel better quickly.

While we have owned this small estate in south Kodagu bordering the Brahmagiri wildlife reserve for over six years, rarely did we move around the nook and corners of the estate. We were also remote owners, trying to do things over the phone and transferring money through Net banking most of the time. Recently we moved near the farm, saying goodbye to my 25-year software career in Bengaluru, so we may have better control over the estate. But our regular writer or manager found himself a job with the Forest Department in the elephant chasing team. That sure is an important job in this elephant country. So that’s how we landed up with the young crew.

While I have had a better feel of the estate ever since, you are always cautious in a coffee estate with wild animals in proximity. Typically it is just a couple of hours at the estate and trust the supervisor

does the work. Now that I am doubling as supervisor, I had to be around and pay the wages at the end of the day.

Having spent more than 25 years in a job where you type things from the desk and fly around occasionally in airplanes for business, physical fitness was not my strength. But I can swing the knife and harvest oranges and lemons, retrieve areca nut sheaths, all the mundane stuff. But no climbing trees or digging the ground. The estate is on a slope, maybe like climbing up and down a two-storey building. That in itself is great exercise for an ex-software guy. I was shadowing the guys: it was mostly trimming the live fences and planting some plants. So we covered most of the territory today.

Standing up and working doesn’t come naturally to a software guy. I can stand for a couple of hours, but stand from 9 to 4? That was well beyond my capabilities. But this is not a boring, artificially lit office with unhealthy air-conditioning. Pristine nature in a shade-grown coffee estate where low-hanging clouds are around during the monsoon, hemmed in by the hills in the Western Ghats. So there is a bit of fresh air and scenery that produces some adrenaline to compensate.

Unfortunately, chemical farming is polluting rivers at the source these days. Herbicides such as glyphosate are being used indiscriminately by most people without any thought for side-effects and the pollution it causes to the environment. A selfie here and there at the nice corners with awesome background was a good break as well.

By lunch-time the knees were moaning, I was planning to take rest in the changing room. But I was the supervisor and was supposed to guide the folks. Lunch-break seemed to give some juice to the knees. Usually I don’t pack lunch; either I go home or I have lunch at home and go to the estate. But today I was the supervisor. So it was all prepared.

Going organic

It turned out there were many unknown corners in the estate for me. Also, organic farming hasn’t hurt the plants as they said; many of the plants, coffee and pepper and oranges, were in fact thriving. There were earthworms ploughing the land, the foot marks of deer were visible, and there was a bit of elephant dung from a couple of years ago lying around. Being a traditional estate with a variety of shade trees, it is a bit difficult to remember the shade trees except the not-so-shady silver oaks and the jackfruit trees.

These boys had good knowledge about the trees and plants, local wisdom indeed! We had the neighbour’s dog for security. He stalked us and we shared food. A couple of pork bones that I got him a few days ago made him fall for me. Till then he wouldn’t let me touch him; now he wants to touch me all the time!

It turned out to be quite an enjoyable outing, rather work. Sitting down and driving back took some adjusting of the stacked vertebrae. But the worker makes just Rs. 450 a day and if you don’t make it to work, you get zilch. It’s Rs. 300 if you are a woman. Estate owners complain about high wages these days. We’ve had an easy life relatively, born to educated parents, worked in nice air-conditioned offices with free coffee, flying around in airplanes, staying in good hotels, good money in the pocket to retire before you reach 50.

But there are undeniable scars on the body and mind of a stressful life.  Small unfortunate incidents can set the worker back by a long way. Even the global price movements of coffee or pepper imports from

Vietnam can impact them. Medical facilities are pretty basic, medical colleges or specialty hospitals are almost a 100 km away. It is indeed a tough life in the villages and fields out there. Driving back around the beautiful countryside, the thought lingers — why were these people born differently than I was? Maybe I could have retired 10 years ago. All those spreadsheets that calculated whether our savings would last a lifetime looked pointless compared to the struggle of these people. 

p_jayadeep@yahoo.com

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.